THE RAW SHARK TEXTS

"Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles."
—page 413, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

The Raw Shark Texts holds great promise. It is pregnant with possibilities in the same way that Jeff Noon's Vurt and William Gibson's Neuromancer and Idoru are. It presents and sustains those possibilities until the final of four sections, whereupon it collapses in on itself.

A man awakes upon the floor of a room, unsure of who and where he is. He finds written instructions from the First Eric Sanderson explaining what is happening and whom to contact. He follows the instructions. In meeting with his therapist, Dr. Randle, he discovers that he has been suffering from dissociative amnesia since the accidental death of his girlfriend Clio three years prior. This is the eleventh episode of amnesia in the past two years.

Letters soon begin to arrive from the First Eric Sanderson. They inform the second Eric Sanderson that he is being pursued by a conceptual shark, a Ludovician, that is devouring his memories, stealing more in each feeding. Eric soon encounters the shark in his apartment.

The middle two sections of the book then detail his pursuit of knowledgeable individuals to help him elude, hunt, and capture the shark. The final section implodes when Eric and his new partners, also bent on destroying the Ludovician, set sail on a conceptual ship. The scenes on the shark boat, the Orpheus, are stolen almost verbatim from the movie Jaws. They are so cliché and overwrought as to render the tension that has built through the first three sections of the book null and void.

I enjoyed that the book was built around the skeletal narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice. I was intrigued by the novelty of the Ludovician and the other conceptual fish, that swim and feed in the "flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect." I felt the terror that Eric felt.

But, the blatant ripoff of Jaws was too much. It essentially ruined what could have been a great book.

I also know that Steven Hall has expended a lot of energy and time in promoting the story in order that it also be made into a movie. I wish he had spent more time worrying about the novel.